Video Looks And Laughs At Depression-era `Nudie` Films

Now that Hollywood finds no subject indelicate, it`s difficult to recall a time when ``hygiene`` was a euphemism for sexual relations and women were

``ashamed`` unto suicide if they should get into ``trouble.``

But the puritanical attitude of the 1930s and `40s was real (if perhaps superficial), and its aura is recaptured in Kit Parker Video`s ``Sex and Buttered Popcorn`` (70 minutes, $29.95), a retrospective of the exploitation

``nudie`` movies that only hinted at what today`s pornography makes too plain.

With Ned Beatty as host, the slickly produced tape covers the sensationalistic movies typically distributed by ``road show`` men. They had titles such as ``The March of Crime,`` ``Escort Girl,`` ``Child Bride`` and

``Mom and Dad.`` The distributors-known among themselves as ``the Forty Thieves``-would literally travel through a territory with their reels, going from theater to theater and arranging for one- or two-night stands. At the end of the shows, they would split the money with the theater owners.

Road-show fare always promised more shocks than it delivered. Under the guise of a moral lecture, a movie would present disgraceful examples of drug abuse and promiscuous behavior-reefer-smoking, carousing and women sitting around in slips. After an hour of this, the last 15 minutes would be devoted to punishing the sinners, complete with stern warnings to parents to take their child-rearing responsibilities seriously.

The compilation is built around the reminiscences of two road-show veterans, David Friedman and Dan Sonney, who sit across from each other at a table and laugh about what rascals they were.

Sonney acknowledges that for all their sensationalism, the movies were pretty tame. But he takes pride in saying, ``I never had a customer ask for his money back. And I would have given it to him.`` Snorts Friedman, ``In a pig`s eye you would have.``

Their jesting aside, the attraction of ``Sex and Buttered Popcorn`` is its generous excerpts from some truly awful movies. Made on shoestring budgets with amateur actors (Friedman and Sonney are seen as bit actors in their own productions), these clunky morality plays exist as pretexts for showing the female body in states of undress.

Since the extent of the permissible undressing varied by local ordinance, the producers/distributors had alternate versions at the ready. In the funniest segment, a scene of four women lounging in a bedroom is shown in two versions; fully dressed in one, attired in underwear in the other. When intercut, their clothes pop off and on with comic suddenness.

Almost as fascinating is the ``nature camp`` genre. These films purported to ponder the pros and cons of nudism as a social issue, all the while savoring acres of female flesh.

Unfortunately, the repetitiveness of the movies becomes quickly apparent, and the campy delight of the tape wears thin long before the 70 minutes are up. There are some great curiosities (a glimpse of legendary stripper Tempest Storm, in color, as well as a few seconds of Lenny Bruce as an actor), but only pop-culture historians will stay interested.